In the autumn of 1959, Anchorage airport dispatchers heard the last words of the captain of a DC-3, Flight 257, route from Fairbanks to the U.S. military base in Greenland. The voice of the pilot, Jonathan Hargrave, shook as if an icy hand was clutching his throat: ‘They're in the cockpit! We're all going to die!’

- Then the connection went dead and the radar marker disappeared as if it had been erased from the screen. Search teams scoured the Gulf of Alaska for weeks but found no wreckage or bodies. The Air Force classified the investigation as a ‘technical malfunction’. But those who studied the tapes of the conversations whispered about a strange noise in the background - like metal scraping mixed with someone's intermittent breathing.

Decades later, the DC-3 disappearance zone became a cursed place for pilots. In 1978, the crew of a Boeing 707 freighter, flying over the same coordinates, received a radio signal: ‘They're watching... they're always watching!’ - and an hour later the plane crashed into the ocean. In 1992, the pilots of a private Cessna heard the distorted cry of ‘We're all going to die!’ over the airwaves and changed course in panic, but they were found the next day in the woods - dead, with faces frozen in mute horror. Local fishermen spoke of ‘black shadows’ gliding over the water, and scientists who dared to lower sonar devices into the depths recorded strange pulses - as if something huge and alive was moving in the ice.

In the 2000s, history repeated itself. A C-130 Hercules transport carrying a group of US military engineers disappeared while flying over the Arctic. Two hours before the crash, the co-pilot, Lieutenant Emma Carter, got on the phone: ‘We have... a problem. There's someone in the cockpit.’ After a moment's silence, she whispered: ‘They don't look human.’ A moment later there was a howl on the air - the same voice from 1959 screaming for death - and then silence. The temperature outside had dropped to -80°C, even though it was summer in the Arctic.

The investigation was led by Dr Evelyn Morgan, a physicist who had studied the Hargrave Zone. Her team travelled on the icebreaker Arctic One to the coordinates of the C-130's disappearance. The instruments behaved strangely: compasses showed south where there was none, and radars caught reflections of non-existent objects. During the night, Evelyn awoke to a banging on the hull. A shadow flickered in the porthole, a man in a flight uniform, his face covered with frost. His eyes were blank and his fingers curved like claws. ‘They won't let you go,’ he hissed, before dissolving into darkness. Evelyn recognized him: it was Jonathan Hargrave.

The next morning the icebreaker was trapped. The ice closed around the hull, the radio was silent, and the crew began to disappear. First the mechanic Thomas disappeared, then the radio operator. They found his watch in the hold, the hands turning backwards. Evelyn found an audio tape from the C-130 in the lab. In addition to the screams, there was a voice humming something in an ancient language. The translator later said: ‘It's a curse. They're saying there's a gateway under the ice. And they are hungry.’

Evelyn tried to steer the ship away, but navigation didn't work. Silhouettes of aero planes flashed in the fog - all missing for the last 70 years. In the night, a knock sounded in her cabin. Standing outside the door was Emma Carter. Her skin was blue, her eyes empty. ‘They're tearing time apart,’ she whispered. - We're stuck between worlds.’ Dozens of shadows in flight uniforms loomed behind Emma. Evelyn slammed the door shut, but the voices haunted her, ‘You're already one of us.’

Three days later, Arctic One was found drifting a hundred miles from the zone. Everyone but Evelyn was missing. There was one last entry in her log, ‘They showed me... everything. This isn't the end. They were here before us. They took Hargrave, they took Emma. Now they want more.’

Now the ‘Hargrave area’ has been closed, but radio amateurs still catch whispers on the air: ‘They're close.’ And in the hangar at Anchorage Airport, the black box of a DC-3 is gathering dust. If you listen to the tape all the way through, after the scream, you hear a voice that couldn't have been there in 1959 - low, hoarse, as if speaking through ice: ‘Evelyn... you already know. We're all going to die.’

Who are ‘they’ - ghosts, aliens, or ancient beings? Why do victims become part of the anomaly? What does the Arctic ice hide? And if Evelyn is a survivor, why does her name resound in a recording made decades before she was born ...